things to make you smart — 1 fairly sure investigation

things to make you smart, taken together as a single category, includes books, podcasts, supplements, mobile apps, and one very specific haircut from a salon in brooklyn. i’m fairly sure the haircut is a stretch on the part of the listicle author. i’m also fairly sure i am, demographically, the exact target market for the supplement.

i am writing this from the desk while carla sits in the annual planning meeting on the third floor with the coffee that smells like a decision. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning before anyone notices i’m not at standup. the digital fridge is open in another tab — that is what i call the magnet board where i pin the screenshots i swear i will revisit. i am revisiting it now, in the way a man revisits things, which is to scroll past them.

the working hypothesis: things to make you smart are mostly already in the room with you. you just gave them other names, like “stuff” and “the chair where the laundry lives.”

1. things to make you smart, brief

here is the manual on the bias where you only believe what already agrees with you, which i am citing first because everything that follows is downstream of it. if you read one thing this morning, it is that one. i read it once and decided it was talking about other people, which is itself the bias, which is the joke.

the listicle premise is this: somebody, usually a person with a podcast, has decided that things to make you smart can be ranked, bought, and stacked on a shelf. i don’t believe this. i believe things to make you smart are mostly behaviors, and the supplement industry is mostly a faith-based pricing model, which is its own retirement system in miniature if you squint.

the categories the internet wants to sell you: cognitive (apps), nutritional (powders), educational (courses), experiential (retreats in places where the wifi is bad on purpose). i have tried four of those. one was a powder. it tasted like a wet floor.

i submit, instead, the following five entries. they are free. they are also embarrassing in a particular way that all true things are, which is the kind of embarrassment you can’t return to the store.

2. thing one, the bar test

the bar test is simple. you take an idea you think is brilliant, and you go to the corner bar, and you tell it to mike. mike runs his own taxes, which is to say mike has not filed his taxes since 2019, but mike listens. mike has a face that does not move when he is bored, and a face that moves a lot when he is interested. you watch the face. you do not watch the words.

i ran a recent idea past mike. it was about a supplement i was considering, the kind of nootropic blend the algorithm has been showing me at 3:14pm for three weeks. mike’s face did not move. then mike said, “is it the one with the mushroom on the label.” i said yes. mike said, “they had that at the pharmacy. it expired in march.” mike took a sip. the bar test was complete in eleven seconds. things to make you smart, in this case, was mike, because mike had already done the looking-up.

the test works because mike is not selling me anything. mike is also not impressed by anything, which is a separate skill. an idea that survives mike survives most rooms. an idea that does not survive mike was not an idea, it was a feeling with a price tag.

3. thing two, the 2 am notebook

at 2 am, when the apartment is honest with itself, i wake up with what i believe is a complete theory of something. last week it was a complete theory of why grocery prices feel personal. the week before it was a complete theory of why elevators have mirrors. before that, a complete theory of fitted sheets, which i do not own.

the trick that makes things to make you smart actually work: write the 2 am thing down. on paper. with a pen. not on the phone, because the phone has the algorithm on it, and the algorithm will, by 2:14pm the next day, have rearranged the thought into something that wants you to buy a mat.

i have a notebook by the bed for this. it is mostly blank. when i do write in it, the next morning i can read about half of it. the other half is a sentence that goes “the ELEVATOR IS A — ” and then a long line that suggests i fell asleep mid-revelation. the half i can read is, on average, twice as smart as anything i think during business hours. things to make you smart, here, is the pen, which is free, and the notebook, which i bought once and have not had to replace.

4. thing three, dad’s quote, paraphrased

my dad used to say something like: “if you can’t explain it to the man at the next table, you don’t know it.” i am paraphrasing because i have spent fifteen years not remembering it exactly, which i think proves the point. it is one of the more famous things he said, and like most famous things in a household, it had a longer original version that nobody saved.

the rule, in my house, applied to anything from car insurance to why the dishwasher was running. you had to be able to put it into one sentence. one sentence. no “well, technically”, no second clause. things to make you smart, dad’s version, was a hard limit on how long you could talk before you knew you were faking it.

i fail this test approximately every day at standup. i can talk for four minutes about a thing i started last quarter and not, by the end of those four minutes, have said what the thing actually is. dad would have rolled his eyes. dad’s eye-roll, i now believe, was an entire educational philosophy. it was free. it cost less than the supplement. it definitely cost less than the haircut.

5. thing four, the seventh microwave

i am on my seventh microwave. this is the seventh i have killed, mostly through the kind of fork-related decisions a man makes when the apartment is dark and the leftovers are at stake. each microwave has taught me something. the seventh microwave has taught me that things to make you smart, sometimes, look like an appliance that won’t stop beeping at 11:23 in the morning for reasons it will not explain.

the lesson: i now know, before i open the door, what is and is not a microwave object. forks are out. metal lids are out. anything with a foil corner is out, which i learned in a way i will not describe. you can buy a course on critical thinking, or you can kill seven microwaves and arrive at an applied epistemology that, while expensive in microwaves, has the great advantage of being unforgettable.

this is, by the way, the only listicle entry where you should consider an actual product. if you, like me, are bad at microwaves and worse at remembering, an inverter model with a child lock is a thing that exists. the lock is for the inverter, not for me. though for me also.

6. thing five, the third yoga mat

the third yoga mat lives, currently, under my couch. it is rolled up. it has been rolled up since 2023. i can see one corner of it from the desk in my mind, even now, sticking out like a small purple tongue. the mat is one of the great teaching objects in the kitchen-adjacent room. it teaches by being there.

the lesson is this: i bought the third mat because i had decided the second mat was the problem. the second mat was, in fact, the same as the first mat. the first mat was, in fact, the same as the third mat. the only thing that ever changed was the box. things to make you smart, in this case, is the mat under the couch, which is silently telling me i don’t do yoga and never have. it is the cheapest tutor i have ever paid.

this also relates, painfully, to the long history of looking foolish at my own expense — the fool, in the mat sense, is a man who keeps buying the same object and waiting for the object to fix him. the object never does. the object is just an object. the mat does not know it is a mat.

7. verdict, the things were already there

here is the verdict, and you can pin it to the digital fridge. things to make you smart are a list of five things i already had: a bar where mike sits, a notebook by the bed, a parent’s recycled sentence, a kitchen appliance with a body count, and a yoga mat under the couch. the total cost, retroactively, is the price of the second and third mats, which i should not have bought, and the seven microwaves, which were inevitable.

none of this is a productivity system. there is no app. the closest thing to an app is mike, and mike does not have notifications. things to make you smart, in this listicle, are mostly things to make you stop and look at what’s already on the counter.

the haircut from brooklyn, by the way, i looked into. it costs ninety-five dollars. i am not, on reflection, the target market. i am the target market for a notebook i already own. you can also enjoy the long-running television show about a psychiatrist named frasier, which, while not a thing to make you smart, is at least a thing that thinks out loud, which is a related skill.

↑